The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

Paul Collier reveals that 50 failed states - home to the poorest one billion people on earth - pose the central challenge of the developing world in the 21st century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards.

Development as Freedom

By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development - for both rich and poor - in the 21st century. Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities.

The End of Poverty

This landmark exploration of prosperity and poverty distills the life work of an economist Time calls one of the world's 100 most influential people. Sachs's aim is nothing less than to deliver a big picture of how societies emerge from poverty. To do so he takes listeners in his footsteps, explaining his work in Bolivia, Russia, India, China, and Africa.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

Over the last century, global poverty has largely been viewed as a technical problem that merely requires the right "expert" solutions. Yet all too often, experts recommend solutions that fix immediate problems without addressing the systemic political factors that created them in the first place. Further, they produce an accidental collusion with "benevolent autocrats", leaving dictators with yet more power to violate the rights of the poor.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton - one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty - tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world.

Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

In 1983, Muhammad Yunus established Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with miniscule loans. Believing that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a few, Yunus aimed to support that spark of personal initiative and enterprise by which the poor might lift themselves out of poverty forever. Grameen Bank now provides over $2.5 billion in micro-loans to more than two million families in rural Bangladesh.

The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off

How can developing countries grow their economies? Most answers to this question center on what the rich world should or shouldn't do for the poor world. In The Quest for Prosperity, Justin Yifu Lin--the first non-Westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank - focuses on what developing nations can do to help themselves.Since the end of the Second World War, prescriptions for economic growth have come and gone. Often motivated more by ideology than practicality, these blueprints have had mixed success on the ground.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia: Second Edition

Translated into 100 languages, winner of the National Book Award, and named one of the 100 Most Influential Books since World War II by the Times Literary Supplement, Anarchy, State, and Utopia remains one of the most theoretically trenchant and philosophically rich defenses of economic liberalism to date as well as a foundational text in classical libertarian thought. With a new introduction by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, this revised edition will introduce Nozick and his work to a new generation of listeners.

The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation's wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that "their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live." Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable. He examines our current state, then teases out its implications for democracy, for monetary and budgetary policy, and for globalization. He closes with a plan for a more just and prosperous future.

The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers

The nearly three billion people living on two dollars a day are not just the world’s greatest challenge - they represent an extraordinary market opportunity. The key is what Paul Polak and Mal Warwick call Zero-Based Design: starting from scratch to create innovative products and services tailored for the very poor, armed with a thorough understanding of what they really want and need, and driven by what Polak and Warwick call "the ruthless pursuit of affordability". Polak has been doing this work for years, and Warwick has extensive experience in both business and philanthropy.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science

In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline. Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world - but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

isaiah says:"The book is a great review of how we got to where we are today"

The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential best seller The End of Poverty - disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development." The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the reality of human life.

Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs

Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his revolutionary new concept that promises to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise: social business.

Globalization and Its Discontents

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national best-seller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank.

Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all are examples of a mindset produced by scarcity. Drawing on cutting-edge research from behavioral science and economics, Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need.

Who Gets What - And Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of "goods," like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google?

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Publisher's Summary

Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world’s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning, that poverty at the level of 99 cents a day is just a more extreme version of the experience any of us have when our income falls uncomfortably low.

This important book illuminates how the poor live, and offers all of us an opportunity to think of a world beyond poverty.

This is one of those rare books that strikes the right balance between being choked full of fascinating information, and not being over the head of a non-specialists. It has a tremendous breadth of coverage, and I would absolutely recommend it first (before anything by Sachs or Easterly, for example) for those interested in development economics. (It's not a bad read for economists either.)

For those who don't know: there's a longstanding feud between Sachs and Easterly--who sit at opposite ends of Manhattan at Columbia and NYU respectively--over, among other things, whether giving more aid to poor countries actually does any good, with Sachs arguing that it does, and Easterly basically arguing that if you don't have good "institutions"--which no one ever quite fully defines--nothing is going to help. Banerjee and and Duflo, at MIT, are trying to move the discipline beyond this old argument, and I would say largely succeed in this book. They do this by focusing on data driven results, especially experimental results, which are very rare in much of economics, but are becoming more and more the norm in development since there's a good deal of donor money and projects in poor countries can be remarkably inexpensive. So, for example, there's this really old irritating argument over whether giving away mosquito bednets, as opposed to selling them cheaply, actually leads to less usage because people don't value them. Well, someone finally actually did the experiment, and found that people who are given bednets mostly do actually use them, though they may take extras and waste them, and selling them really cheap works pretty well too. This is what development economists spend their time on.

But there are many more interesting facts to be learned from this book. For example, hunger apparently isn't a problem almost anywhere in the world, though a few specific spots in sub-Saharan Africa may be exceptions. But in most places, if you give people more money to be spent on food, they don't end up eating any more calories; they just eat nicer food. On the other hand, poor nutrition among children and pregnant women may be an issue with serious long-term costs. Community scale drinking water systems may be one of the most effective ways of preventing illness. Microfinance doesn't hurt the poor, but it doesn't seem to help all that much either. Insurance schemes for the poor may seem like a nice idea, but are very hard to implement and are often resisted by those they're intended to help.

My main quibble: This new approach to development is inherently microeconomic (as opposed to macro) in nature. You can't really do macroeconomic experiments where you transform one country's economy and not another. Which doesn't mean macro issues aren't discussed at all--there's a very long discourse on how poverty traps, essentially a macro idea, are to be understood at the micro level. But some of the big ideas in development are inherently macro in nature. One book can't do everything, but since I really do think this should be the first book non-specialists read, I would have liked the authors to summarize some of the other perspectives on the field a little more/better.

For anyone who's even briefly browsed The Economist, there is a lot we think we know about development, most of it gleaned from armchair economists' big ideas about what should be done, how the world can be changed, etc. This book takes a very different perspective and looks directly at what the evidence from the field really tells us. There is so much that we think we know but we just don't and, if you choose to read it, I recommend that you take pencil and paper, and ask yourself a few questions:

Why are the poor malnourished?Why are the poor unhealthy?Why do the poor have so many children?Why don't the poor save?Why are poor countries corrupt?

I found the book illuminating in coming to answer these questions from ACTUAL field evidence in ways that are not only unexpected but ring true. It is such a breath a fresh air when most of what we hear in this area is speculation about might happen given one or another aid policy.

Yet, and this is only one part where I should caution the reader, the book is not nearly as objective as the authors want us to believe. In some places (microcredit being the big example), the authors depend on the willingness of non-governmental institutions to share their private data and, understandably, are unwilling to explicitly write against them. Given the quality of most of the book, this becomes laughable in some places when, for example, the authors do a parenthesis on the great intelligence of a person in an out-of-the-blue impromptu or, in contrast to the rest of the book, when the authors become vague about unfavorable findings in their own statistical research. Such a conflict of interest is unavoidable for sure but I wish it had been stated more clearly at the beginning of the book.

This book provides a close up look at a range of studies focused on the bottom billion. In it, you'll learn a bit about randomized control testing (RCT) and its strength as a research tool. Moreover, you'll get a glimpse into what various researchers have learned about the causes and effects surrounding hunger, disease prevention, economic progress, as well as how the poorest parents make family planning decisions.

Research-based insights that will surprise most of us. Must-read for the socially conscious. This book is packed with experimental-quality data and conclusions that gives us all the opportunity to help reduce poverty with initiatives that actually work.

I really liked this book because it cleans up with some former classics in development. I think certain aspects are left out (critical analysis about the downside of RCTs because of its predefined outcome indicators and hence ignoring the complexity of certain cause-effect-relationships)

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

Certain perception we have within our "western" believe systems about "the poor" are verified.

What three words best describe Brian Holsopple’s voice?

quite neutral, ok.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

Any additional comments?

worth reading if in global economics, health, international relations etc

What made the experience of listening to Poor Economics the most enjoyable?

This book subjects the theory behind development approaches to experimentation and provides useful illustrations of why a strict rational choice approach to economic thinking often fails to model people well.

What a refreshing view! Far from a blind optimism the examples here showed a desire to get to the truth of the the issues plaguing many people in the world.

While there were still some biases (for example, it seemed to be a given that use of contraceptives is a good thing), but even in uncomfortable situations the authors seemed to be authentically seeking truth and answers to problems rather than reinforcing their viewpoint.

Their conclusion: tackle small, well-defined problems using Random Controlled Tests and roll out based on the data.

Challenging book, certainly no easy answers to take away. A bit dry in parts - requires your concentration - but the research findings are quite astonishing at times. If you're looking for a simple ideology on poverty and aid, look somewhere else. If you're willing to dig in and navigate your way through the nuances then this might be for you.

This book presents some amazing stories and statistics in an easy to understand format. Each chapter is a different topic and keeps you interested, makes it easy to dip in and out of. Some fascinating theories that I've not heard or read elsewhere. A must read!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Mr. T. P. Bedingfield

8/31/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Good and very interesting"

It was welll thought out and interesting. If concentrated on India too much. All good.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Hidde

Amstelveen, Netherlands

4/13/13

Overall

"Lots of new insights into poverty"

Interesting read with lots of research which gave me a view inside the lives of poor people. Not all chapters are interesting, but I really gained insights about how the poor deal with medical costs and how micro credit works in practice and helps some of them, but definitely not all. I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in practical economy, medical staff and anyone who's interested in how poor people deal with their lives.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

P

London, United Kingdom

1/15/13

Overall

"No reference material"

This is not a review of the audible book which is interesting from the beginning so I gave it 5 stars for the benefit of the doubt.

However, beware that the reference material did not end up in My Library as claimed by audible - this is critical to the book so please make sure you contact them!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Report Inappropriate Content

If you find this review inappropriate and think it should be removed from our site, let us know. This report will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action.